Machine Learning and Magical Thinking

Talking Machines is your window into the world of machine learning. Your hosts, Katherine Gorman and Neil Lawrence, bring you clear conversations with experts in the field, insightful discussions of industry news, and useful answers to your questions. Machine learning is changing the questions we can ask of the world around us, here we explore how to ask the best questions and what to do with the answers.

Today on Talking Machines we hear from Google researcher Ilya Sutskever about his work, how he became interested in machine learning, and why it takes a little bit of magical thinking. We take your questions, and explore where the line between human programming and computer learning actually is. And we sift through some news from the field, Ryan explains the concepts behind one of the best papers at NIPS this year, A * Sampling, and Katherine brings up an open letter about research priorities and ethical questions that was recently published.